Hey kids! It’s the guts of the computer that serves these pages!

These shots were taken as I removed the screen I’d just installed to remove the tiny-but-powerful magnet which activates sleep mode when the lid is closed.

The box is an Apple Wallstreet 233Mhz G3 Powerbook I scored on ebay last year for about $200 – it had no screen, and was pretty stripped (it still has what I believe to be a bad charge board, so the battery it came with won’t charge up at all). This is the oldest Mac that Apple rates for use with OSX. In reality you can get OSX to run on any Power Mac, given infinite patience and infinite knowledge of BSD haxen. This means you could set up a 6100 with it, something I’d recommend only for the masochistic among us.

Masochistic is surely the word to describe the rigamarole I went through getting the headless ‘book to do what I needed: I upgraded the HD to 10 gigs, maxed out the ram, and finally learned that you can actually install OSX to an outboard powerbook when booted in SCSI Target Disk mode and hooked up to another machine – Apple thoughfully disabled outboard video support of the OSX installer disc so even if you hook the ‘book up to a monitor it won’t pump any bits out when booted from the install disc.

Anyway.

I saw a screen on ebay for under a hundred dollars that was only for Wallstreets (the G3 series of Powerbooks, especially the ’98 Wallstreets and the series right after them is actually worth more in parts than whole, so you can pick up anything you need), and I grabbed it. Now, bellerophon has a head. Will I be able to resist using it as an actual laptop? I think so. It makes such a kick-ass server.